Ben Chu in The Independent
Psychologists have identified a phenomenon they call “confirmation bias”. This is the tendency for people to interpret new information in a way that simply confirms their pre-existing beliefs. We’ve seen quite a lot of confirmation bias in the wake of Carillion’s belly flop into liquidation this week.
For some on the left this is all confirmation that privatisation of the provision of public services has been a disaster. It shows that corporate fat cats can walk away with profits while ordinary workers and small firms suffer, public services are put in jeopardy and taxpayers foot the bill.
For some on the right, on the other hand, it confirms that privatisation is working broadly as it should. A badly-run private company failed. Its contracts will now be re-distributed to other, more competent, private firms. As for profiteering at public expense, they see the precise opposite. If anything, civil servants have got too good at putting the squeeze on private contractors, forcing them into bidding wars which screw down their margins to almost nothing. Tough for the private companies, certainly, but it means better value for money for taxpayers.
Both sides should take a step back and remove the blinkers. It’s certainly welcome that Carillion’s shareholders and its lenders have not, despite intense corporate lobbying, been bailed out by the Government in the way banks were rescued in 2008. The shareholders will lose their shirts. And the banks must write-down their loans. That is how it ought to be. Leftist nationalisers ought to recognise that this represents progress.
But champions of privatisation should also face up to some unpalatable realities laid bare by this scandal. The profit margins of some contractors may be small but Carillion still managed to pay regular and substantial dividends to its shareholders, even when it was clear the company was financially overstretched.
And there have been high personal rewards for failed management. If these services had been managed “in-house”, no civil servant would have been paid the £1.5m a year that Richard Howson, the former chief executive of Carillion, commanded. The head of the NHS, Simon Stevens, by comparison, earns £190,000 a year. Are we really to believe that more modestly paid civil servants would have been vastly less competent than Howson and his team at Carillion?
As for the idea that civil servants have morphed into hard-nosed contracting experts, that rather stretches credulity given the miserable history of Private Finance Initiative deals. Moreover, this adversarial image isn’t a particularly useful way to conceptualise the relationship between private contractors and the state when it comes to the delivery of public services.
This relationship is inherently different from a normal commercial transaction between two parties. It has to be a much closer (and ongoing) relationship because society cannot cope with even a brief interruption of supply of the services. Ministers can’t allow a prison to be unguarded, a hospital to go uncleaned, a school to be without catering, a care home to be shut down.
Commissioning a contractor to deliver a public service extremely cheaply is a false economy if that contractor runs the risk of financial collapse and the state will have to fork out to keep the show on the road, as it is now with Carillion’s contracts.
This reality was also demonstrated last year when the Transport Secretary allowed Virgin and Stagecoach to exit their East Coast rail franchise early, costing the state £2bn in foregone payments, after the operators discovered they were running at a loss. It was not wise for the Transport Department to have accepted such a high bid from the consortium in 2015, however good it looked at the time.
One clear lesson from Carillion’s demise is that much more public transparency over contractors’ books is needed, something the National Audit Office urged back in 2013. The Carillion fiasco demonstrates that it’s impossible to rely on the expertise, or perhaps integrity, of auditing firms to flag looming problems.
In the end, the broader privatisation versus nationalisation debate might be an unhelpful framing of the issue. Even if many more services are managed in-house, as Labour wants, there will still be contracting out. Even Jeremy Corbyn is not demanding the nationalisation of construction firms.
When it comes to the delivery of vital public services, there is an unavoidable symbiosis between the state sector and the private sector. There is no purity to be found. The key question, which is too little addressed, is the appropriate balance of authority in that relationship and the institutional checks on that authority to ensure the broad public interest is always paramount.
Tuesday 16 January 2018
Justice as a king’s command
Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn
REMEMBER Emperor Akbar in Mughal-i-Azam? Akbar ka insaf uska hukum hai. Akbar’s command is his justice. This was how the great Mughal ruler dismissed a poor woman’s petition to save her daughter from imminent and wilful execution in the movie. In the real world, Akbar may have never spoken Urdu just as he may have never been approached to spare the life of any Anarkali if she ever existed. The dialogue writer, Wajahat Mirza, died in Karachi in 1990 but not before unwittingly describing an essential feature of justice everywhere — that it is universally a subjective thing. It was the whim of ancient kings and it remains a whim packaged in ornate terminology today, be it as a feature of democracy or of the Third Reich.
Four judges decreed the hanging of Z.A. Bhutto under military dictatorship. Three opposed it. Bhutto lost the lottery. You may see the judges on both sides as scrupulous practitioners of law and you may see their choices as a personal predilection or both. Yakub Memon would have perhaps lived had a different judge had his way. One judge unseated Indira Gandhi from power, another endorsed her emergency rule. President Pratibha Patil opposed the death penalty on principle, to quote a different example, so she never rejected a mercy petition even if she did it by leaving the files unattended. Pranab Mukherjee, who succeeded her, clearly thought otherwise. He threw out all the mercy petitions he could, opening the path to the gallows for those on death row. Justice is thus both a lottery and the wilful command of a moody emperor with or without the judge’s wig.
As far as I am aware, there were no lawyers in Aurangzeb’s or Kautilya’s time though Shakespeare could not have conjured Portia without a nascent European tradition of black-robed advocates. The encounter between the petitioner and the magistrate in Chandragupta Maurya’s court would have been direct and swift, with no place for intermediaries, today’s LL.B degree holders.
In a different era, the lawyers can mutate into an ideologically driven mob, for example to shower Mumtaz Qadri with rose petals while cheering him for killing a secular, liberal soul that Salmaan Taseer was. And there were the Indian counterparts who viciously assaulted outspoken student leader Kanhaiya Kumar as he was being escorted to the courtroom.
Judges often change their ideological preferences to comply with the doctrine of the state they serve.
In India, there is a new tradition, which I also noticed in Srinagar, to prevent lawyers from defending a petitioner. Hansal Mehta made Shahid, a powerful film depicting the true story of a Muslim lawyer in Mumbai who was killed by irate pseudo nationalists because he defended the weak and probably innocent Muslim men in law courts against accusations of terrorism.
Judges can be killed too, usually falling to those they have ruled against. Three US federal judges are on record as being murdered by those their judgements did not please. During the troubled period, the IRA killed three judges, including Lord Justice Sir Maurice Gibson in 1987. That’s a good reason that judges everywhere are accorded adequate personal security.
Indian judge B.H. Loya was hearing a fake encounter case when he died suddenly. The Bombay High Court is looking into allegations that he was murdered while the official records say that the 48-year-old judge succumbed to a heart attack. Loya’s family first feared that he might have been killed after turning down a bribe offer. They later said they no longer believed that to be so. There’s public outcry to investigate the death nevertheless, not least because the head of India’s ruling party stands named in the incident. Soon after Loya’s death in December 2014, his successor dropped the fake encounter case against BJP President Amit Shah.
The most telling comment on the cynical state of justice in India came perhaps from a man described as Babu Bajrangi, a self-confessed Hindutva zealot, who was caught in a sting operation carried out by journalist Ashish Khetan, now a member of the Aaam Aadmi Party. Bajrangi said on camera that he was denied bail on murder charges and that his leader would arrange the right judge to set him free. Cases have to be sometimes transferred to different states over fears that justice would not be delivered in a particular state in a particular court, a fear suggesting that judges are a subjective lot.
In the old days justice was delivered on behalf of the ubiquitous moneylender who had the thumb impression of the illiterate peasant on the book of accounts as evidence of money advanced. Indebted peasants are still committing suicide in India in droves, as they fear that the law overtly or covertly favours the creditor. The Portias are there to protect the poor and ignorant from wily Indian Shylocks but they are few and far between.
Judges often change their ideological preferences to comply with the doctrine of the state they serve. The head of the justice department in Nazi Germany was a former Bolshevik. With the rise of right-wing nationalism in India, a gradual ideological shift is perceptible in all institutions. The Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh’s Dattopant Thengadi set up the Akhil Bharatiya Adhivakta Parishad (All India Advocates Council) in 1992, ironically the year the Babri Masjid was demolished in defiance of the Supreme Court’s ruling. The lawyers’ body has produced several judges from its ranks. Justice Deepak Misra, the chief justice of India, seems to be an admirer of the RSS-backed advocates’ body as he was the chief guest at their annual function in Bengaluru two years ago.
Four most senior judges of the Supreme Court took an unprecedented step last week to address a news conference where they expressed the fear that Indian democracy was in peril. Emperor Akbar would not be amused.
REMEMBER Emperor Akbar in Mughal-i-Azam? Akbar ka insaf uska hukum hai. Akbar’s command is his justice. This was how the great Mughal ruler dismissed a poor woman’s petition to save her daughter from imminent and wilful execution in the movie. In the real world, Akbar may have never spoken Urdu just as he may have never been approached to spare the life of any Anarkali if she ever existed. The dialogue writer, Wajahat Mirza, died in Karachi in 1990 but not before unwittingly describing an essential feature of justice everywhere — that it is universally a subjective thing. It was the whim of ancient kings and it remains a whim packaged in ornate terminology today, be it as a feature of democracy or of the Third Reich.
Four judges decreed the hanging of Z.A. Bhutto under military dictatorship. Three opposed it. Bhutto lost the lottery. You may see the judges on both sides as scrupulous practitioners of law and you may see their choices as a personal predilection or both. Yakub Memon would have perhaps lived had a different judge had his way. One judge unseated Indira Gandhi from power, another endorsed her emergency rule. President Pratibha Patil opposed the death penalty on principle, to quote a different example, so she never rejected a mercy petition even if she did it by leaving the files unattended. Pranab Mukherjee, who succeeded her, clearly thought otherwise. He threw out all the mercy petitions he could, opening the path to the gallows for those on death row. Justice is thus both a lottery and the wilful command of a moody emperor with or without the judge’s wig.
As far as I am aware, there were no lawyers in Aurangzeb’s or Kautilya’s time though Shakespeare could not have conjured Portia without a nascent European tradition of black-robed advocates. The encounter between the petitioner and the magistrate in Chandragupta Maurya’s court would have been direct and swift, with no place for intermediaries, today’s LL.B degree holders.
In a different era, the lawyers can mutate into an ideologically driven mob, for example to shower Mumtaz Qadri with rose petals while cheering him for killing a secular, liberal soul that Salmaan Taseer was. And there were the Indian counterparts who viciously assaulted outspoken student leader Kanhaiya Kumar as he was being escorted to the courtroom.
Judges often change their ideological preferences to comply with the doctrine of the state they serve.
In India, there is a new tradition, which I also noticed in Srinagar, to prevent lawyers from defending a petitioner. Hansal Mehta made Shahid, a powerful film depicting the true story of a Muslim lawyer in Mumbai who was killed by irate pseudo nationalists because he defended the weak and probably innocent Muslim men in law courts against accusations of terrorism.
Judges can be killed too, usually falling to those they have ruled against. Three US federal judges are on record as being murdered by those their judgements did not please. During the troubled period, the IRA killed three judges, including Lord Justice Sir Maurice Gibson in 1987. That’s a good reason that judges everywhere are accorded adequate personal security.
Indian judge B.H. Loya was hearing a fake encounter case when he died suddenly. The Bombay High Court is looking into allegations that he was murdered while the official records say that the 48-year-old judge succumbed to a heart attack. Loya’s family first feared that he might have been killed after turning down a bribe offer. They later said they no longer believed that to be so. There’s public outcry to investigate the death nevertheless, not least because the head of India’s ruling party stands named in the incident. Soon after Loya’s death in December 2014, his successor dropped the fake encounter case against BJP President Amit Shah.
The most telling comment on the cynical state of justice in India came perhaps from a man described as Babu Bajrangi, a self-confessed Hindutva zealot, who was caught in a sting operation carried out by journalist Ashish Khetan, now a member of the Aaam Aadmi Party. Bajrangi said on camera that he was denied bail on murder charges and that his leader would arrange the right judge to set him free. Cases have to be sometimes transferred to different states over fears that justice would not be delivered in a particular state in a particular court, a fear suggesting that judges are a subjective lot.
In the old days justice was delivered on behalf of the ubiquitous moneylender who had the thumb impression of the illiterate peasant on the book of accounts as evidence of money advanced. Indebted peasants are still committing suicide in India in droves, as they fear that the law overtly or covertly favours the creditor. The Portias are there to protect the poor and ignorant from wily Indian Shylocks but they are few and far between.
Judges often change their ideological preferences to comply with the doctrine of the state they serve. The head of the justice department in Nazi Germany was a former Bolshevik. With the rise of right-wing nationalism in India, a gradual ideological shift is perceptible in all institutions. The Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh’s Dattopant Thengadi set up the Akhil Bharatiya Adhivakta Parishad (All India Advocates Council) in 1992, ironically the year the Babri Masjid was demolished in defiance of the Supreme Court’s ruling. The lawyers’ body has produced several judges from its ranks. Justice Deepak Misra, the chief justice of India, seems to be an admirer of the RSS-backed advocates’ body as he was the chief guest at their annual function in Bengaluru two years ago.
Four most senior judges of the Supreme Court took an unprecedented step last week to address a news conference where they expressed the fear that Indian democracy was in peril. Emperor Akbar would not be amused.
Sunday 14 January 2018
With Farage rattled and MPs flexing their muscles, the real Brexit battle is just beginning
Toby Helm and Michael Savage in The Guardian
When Nigel Farage emerged from a meeting in Brussels with the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier shortly after midday last Monday his increasingly gloomy mood had darkened further. “The message I got was that they will be happy to trade chocolate and cheese and wine freely with us but when it comes to services, forget it. It ain’t going to happen. I think we are going to have a very bad deal.”
In the early hours of 24 June, 2016, the former Ukip leader, who had, arguably, done more than anyone to deliver the Leave vote, toured TV stations, triumphantly hailing the UK’s “independence day”. In Farage’s view it was not only a defining moment for Britain. It was also one that would demonstrate to other EU member states with strong or emerging eurosceptic movements – he cited Denmark, Italy, Sweden and Austria – that there was another way. “The EU is failing, the EU is dying. I hope that we have knocked the first brick out of the wall,” he declared in the glow of victory.
Nineteen months on, that joy and optimism have been replaced by doubt and fear. These days Farage is a genuinely worried man. He deeply regrets that the Leave campaign effectively “shut up shop” the day after the referendum, believing it was job done. The result of doing so, he told the Observer on Friday, was that the Leave side is now being seriously outgunned by well-funded, well-organised supporters of Remain who are intent on overturning the referendum result.
Three days after his meeting with Barnier, Farage went on TV again and said he was coming round to the view that a second referendum might be the only way to regain the initiative, to cement Brexit and shut down the issue for a generation. He said then that he thought Leave would win again, and by a bigger margin.
But on Friday he was less sure – and revealed the real depth and root of his anxieties. The momentum, he made clear, was running away from the Leavers. They had vacated the field for Remain to run all over. Anti-EU MPs were making a grave mistake, he argued, if they believed that parliament and the British people would just accept any deal that Theresa May could extract. Leavers needed to mobilise for the cause.
“There is no Leave campaign,” Farage said. “I think Leave is in danger of not even making the argument.” He added: “I feel like I did 20 years ago when it looked like we were heading into the euro. We had to set up Business for Sterling to stop it.” Things felt eerily familiar now. “The Remain side is making all the running. They have a majority in parliament and unless we get ourselves organised we could lose the historic victory that was Brexit.”
With the clock ticking, and with parliament having voted to trigger the article 50 process that puts the UK on the legal track to leave the EU on 29 March next year, it is still extremely difficult to see how the Brexit train can be derailed entirely.
But Farage’s interventions over recent days are highly significant, and about far more than the rogueish populist yearning to be back in the headlines. He is nothing if not a shrewd interpreter of prevailing political and public moods. “He is dangerous – and brilliant, in equal measure,” says one ardent Tory MP from the Remain side. “We know that from painful experience.”
Farage fears a very soft Brexit as much as no Brexit at all. And he is not alone in spotting that the forces favouring soft Brexit – in Westminster at least – are now in the ascendancy. It is not just pro-Remain Labour MPs who are marshalling their troops to great effect to demand that their party and parliament as a whole backs as close a relationship as possible with the EU after March next year.
Where John Major and David Cameron had rightwing Eurosceptic rebels to deal with, May, with no Commons majority, now finds her biggest problems coming from those on the pro-EU left flank of the Tory party. Her chaotic reshuffle last week added new recruits to that ever more confident rebel army, among them sacked education secretary and Remainer Justine Greening.
At prime minister’s questions last Wednesday, the day after she left the cabinet, Greening arrived early. When anti-Brexit Tory rebel Dominic Grieve came into the chamber, Greening caught his eye and patted on the vacant seat by her side in a gesture that invited him to be her new neighbour in the naughty soft Brexit corner. Grieve duly accepted.
“It was a fantastic moment for us,” said another in the group, who added that May had made a big mistake ousting the MP for Putney from the cabinet. “A Remainer, from Rotherham, educated at a state school. Who just happens to be in a same sex relationship. How many bloody boxes does she tick for us? For too long this party has been run by a few rightwingers intent on destroying our country. Now we are taking the party back.”
Ryan Shorthouse, director of the modernising Tory pressure group, Bright Blue, said: “Before Theresa May became prime minister, for decades Conservative governments only really faced concerted pressure on the backbenchers from the right of the party. Now, there is a group of high-profile and senior backbenchers on the ‘one nation’ wing who are increasingly co-ordinated, empowered and outspoken.”
This week will be another crucial one in the parliamentary battle on Brexit, over which Farage is agonising. The EU withdrawal bill will complete its third reading and report stage in the Commons on Wednesday before heading to the House of Lords, where it faces a mauling, not least from dozens of pro-Remain peers who favour a second referendum.
Before Christmas, Grieve, a former attorney general, led a successful Tory rebellion against hard Brexit to ensure MPs will have to vote for a new statute before any Brexit deal can be agreed. The effect is to give MPs a vote – and an effective veto, on the outcome of negotiations with Brussels – something the hard Brexiters were determined to resist.
This week the focus will be on Labour, as a growing number of Jeremy Corbyn’s MPs put pressure on their leader to adopt a firmer pro-EU, pro-single market line. Upwards of 60 Labour MPs are now believed to back permanent membership of the single market and customs union after Brexit and are ready to rebel.
Labour has already come a long way down the soft Brexit road – but not far enough for dozens of its MPs. Last summer, shadow Brexit secretary Keir Starmer shifted to support membership of the single market and customs union during a post-Brexit transition of up to four years.
He is now being urged to go much further. This weekend, in a sign of that pressure, the leadership announced it would back an amendment tabled by former shadow Scottish secretary Ian Murray, which he drew up in the belief it would leave the party effectively backing single-market membership for the long term.
The amendment says that, after the final Brexit deal is done and known, Labour will insist on a full independent economic analysis, involving the National Audit Office, the Office of Budget Responsibility, the government actuary’s department, and the finance directorates of each of the devolved administrations, before MPs vote on the final deal.
Chuka Umunna, one of the Labour MPs leading cross-party efforts to secure a soft Brexit, sees this as a step forward, though still an insufficient one.
“This is a significant move, which shows we are rightly focusing on the need to demonstrate what the economic impact of Theresa May’s Tory Brexit will be on people’s lives.
“If such an assessment is not carried out, or if it is and concludes that a Tory Brexit deal would be bad for the economy, we should oppose it. Labour should be clear that at a minimum we should back single market and customs union membership (or full participation) for good.” Meanwhile peers – including many who take the Tory whip – are joining cross-party alliances in an attempt to secure long-term single-market and customs membership.
Some are also planning amendments calling for a second referendum before the UK leaves the EU – the same suggestion as that made by Farage on Tuesday.
On Saturday it emerged that, following Farage’s meeting with Barnier in Brussels last week, it will be the turn of Tory Remainers Grieve and Anna Soubry and Labour MPs Leslie, Umunna and Stephen Doughty to bend the ear of the man leading the EU negotiations on Brexit.
Their meeting with Barnier will be another blow to Farage – and further confirmation of his growing conviction that victory for Leave on the night of 23 June 2016 was far from the end of the story.
When Nigel Farage emerged from a meeting in Brussels with the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier shortly after midday last Monday his increasingly gloomy mood had darkened further. “The message I got was that they will be happy to trade chocolate and cheese and wine freely with us but when it comes to services, forget it. It ain’t going to happen. I think we are going to have a very bad deal.”
In the early hours of 24 June, 2016, the former Ukip leader, who had, arguably, done more than anyone to deliver the Leave vote, toured TV stations, triumphantly hailing the UK’s “independence day”. In Farage’s view it was not only a defining moment for Britain. It was also one that would demonstrate to other EU member states with strong or emerging eurosceptic movements – he cited Denmark, Italy, Sweden and Austria – that there was another way. “The EU is failing, the EU is dying. I hope that we have knocked the first brick out of the wall,” he declared in the glow of victory.
Nineteen months on, that joy and optimism have been replaced by doubt and fear. These days Farage is a genuinely worried man. He deeply regrets that the Leave campaign effectively “shut up shop” the day after the referendum, believing it was job done. The result of doing so, he told the Observer on Friday, was that the Leave side is now being seriously outgunned by well-funded, well-organised supporters of Remain who are intent on overturning the referendum result.
Three days after his meeting with Barnier, Farage went on TV again and said he was coming round to the view that a second referendum might be the only way to regain the initiative, to cement Brexit and shut down the issue for a generation. He said then that he thought Leave would win again, and by a bigger margin.
But on Friday he was less sure – and revealed the real depth and root of his anxieties. The momentum, he made clear, was running away from the Leavers. They had vacated the field for Remain to run all over. Anti-EU MPs were making a grave mistake, he argued, if they believed that parliament and the British people would just accept any deal that Theresa May could extract. Leavers needed to mobilise for the cause.
“There is no Leave campaign,” Farage said. “I think Leave is in danger of not even making the argument.” He added: “I feel like I did 20 years ago when it looked like we were heading into the euro. We had to set up Business for Sterling to stop it.” Things felt eerily familiar now. “The Remain side is making all the running. They have a majority in parliament and unless we get ourselves organised we could lose the historic victory that was Brexit.”
With the clock ticking, and with parliament having voted to trigger the article 50 process that puts the UK on the legal track to leave the EU on 29 March next year, it is still extremely difficult to see how the Brexit train can be derailed entirely.
But Farage’s interventions over recent days are highly significant, and about far more than the rogueish populist yearning to be back in the headlines. He is nothing if not a shrewd interpreter of prevailing political and public moods. “He is dangerous – and brilliant, in equal measure,” says one ardent Tory MP from the Remain side. “We know that from painful experience.”
Farage fears a very soft Brexit as much as no Brexit at all. And he is not alone in spotting that the forces favouring soft Brexit – in Westminster at least – are now in the ascendancy. It is not just pro-Remain Labour MPs who are marshalling their troops to great effect to demand that their party and parliament as a whole backs as close a relationship as possible with the EU after March next year.
Where John Major and David Cameron had rightwing Eurosceptic rebels to deal with, May, with no Commons majority, now finds her biggest problems coming from those on the pro-EU left flank of the Tory party. Her chaotic reshuffle last week added new recruits to that ever more confident rebel army, among them sacked education secretary and Remainer Justine Greening.
At prime minister’s questions last Wednesday, the day after she left the cabinet, Greening arrived early. When anti-Brexit Tory rebel Dominic Grieve came into the chamber, Greening caught his eye and patted on the vacant seat by her side in a gesture that invited him to be her new neighbour in the naughty soft Brexit corner. Grieve duly accepted.
“It was a fantastic moment for us,” said another in the group, who added that May had made a big mistake ousting the MP for Putney from the cabinet. “A Remainer, from Rotherham, educated at a state school. Who just happens to be in a same sex relationship. How many bloody boxes does she tick for us? For too long this party has been run by a few rightwingers intent on destroying our country. Now we are taking the party back.”
Ryan Shorthouse, director of the modernising Tory pressure group, Bright Blue, said: “Before Theresa May became prime minister, for decades Conservative governments only really faced concerted pressure on the backbenchers from the right of the party. Now, there is a group of high-profile and senior backbenchers on the ‘one nation’ wing who are increasingly co-ordinated, empowered and outspoken.”
This week will be another crucial one in the parliamentary battle on Brexit, over which Farage is agonising. The EU withdrawal bill will complete its third reading and report stage in the Commons on Wednesday before heading to the House of Lords, where it faces a mauling, not least from dozens of pro-Remain peers who favour a second referendum.
Before Christmas, Grieve, a former attorney general, led a successful Tory rebellion against hard Brexit to ensure MPs will have to vote for a new statute before any Brexit deal can be agreed. The effect is to give MPs a vote – and an effective veto, on the outcome of negotiations with Brussels – something the hard Brexiters were determined to resist.
This week the focus will be on Labour, as a growing number of Jeremy Corbyn’s MPs put pressure on their leader to adopt a firmer pro-EU, pro-single market line. Upwards of 60 Labour MPs are now believed to back permanent membership of the single market and customs union after Brexit and are ready to rebel.
Labour has already come a long way down the soft Brexit road – but not far enough for dozens of its MPs. Last summer, shadow Brexit secretary Keir Starmer shifted to support membership of the single market and customs union during a post-Brexit transition of up to four years.
He is now being urged to go much further. This weekend, in a sign of that pressure, the leadership announced it would back an amendment tabled by former shadow Scottish secretary Ian Murray, which he drew up in the belief it would leave the party effectively backing single-market membership for the long term.
The amendment says that, after the final Brexit deal is done and known, Labour will insist on a full independent economic analysis, involving the National Audit Office, the Office of Budget Responsibility, the government actuary’s department, and the finance directorates of each of the devolved administrations, before MPs vote on the final deal.
Chuka Umunna, one of the Labour MPs leading cross-party efforts to secure a soft Brexit, sees this as a step forward, though still an insufficient one.
“This is a significant move, which shows we are rightly focusing on the need to demonstrate what the economic impact of Theresa May’s Tory Brexit will be on people’s lives.
“If such an assessment is not carried out, or if it is and concludes that a Tory Brexit deal would be bad for the economy, we should oppose it. Labour should be clear that at a minimum we should back single market and customs union membership (or full participation) for good.” Meanwhile peers – including many who take the Tory whip – are joining cross-party alliances in an attempt to secure long-term single-market and customs membership.
Some are also planning amendments calling for a second referendum before the UK leaves the EU – the same suggestion as that made by Farage on Tuesday.
On Saturday it emerged that, following Farage’s meeting with Barnier in Brussels last week, it will be the turn of Tory Remainers Grieve and Anna Soubry and Labour MPs Leslie, Umunna and Stephen Doughty to bend the ear of the man leading the EU negotiations on Brexit.
Their meeting with Barnier will be another blow to Farage – and further confirmation of his growing conviction that victory for Leave on the night of 23 June 2016 was far from the end of the story.
Saturday 13 January 2018
Imran Khan on Himself
From The Friday Times
Friends, fundos and youthias, I want you to know that I took the Hypocritic oath ages ago while schmoozing my way across London with one eye on my political career back home, and the other on the chicks of Chelsea. I knew that once I’d taken the Hypocritic oath, I’d be free to do Hypocritical things. Like pretending to be a democrat while trying to oust elected governments via conspiracies. Like pretending to be a principled leader while treating my party like a principality. Like defending the disadvantaged while taking advantage of defenseless women. Like funding madrassahs in Pakistan whilst sending my owns sons to England’s best madrassah, at £ 22,000 a year.
The problem is not with me but with this formerly glorious land that was once full of stupas, but is now full of stupids.
Why is my marriage to my spiritual advisor a scandal? Because it shows my utter lack of judgment? Or because it reveals my callousness? Or both?
Well, I don’t care and I’m going to carry on doing whatever or whoever I like. I really thought I had it all under wraps and was enjoying the winter sun with my spiritual advisor out on the lawns of my Bunny Gala estate. Then, suddenly a drone flew past with GEO NEWS written on it. I waved and waved but it didn’t stop for me. It was not until my spiritual advisor gave me a violent nudge in the ribs that I stopped waving. My spiritual advisor dived under the table to hide herself but by then the drone had let down a streamer which said, “touch luck, dumb f—-k”. I was spelling it out to my spiritual advisor when I came to the end and realized that the middle three letters of the last word were missing.
The fact that GEO NEWS’ drones can’t spell so alarmed me that whilst still writing this diary, I began suffering from writer’s block. I turned to my spiritual advisor and said, “please give me a profound thought on which to conclude my diary”. She said what about “the end”?
Friends, fundos and youthias, I want you to know that I took the Hypocritic oath ages ago while schmoozing my way across London with one eye on my political career back home, and the other on the chicks of Chelsea. I knew that once I’d taken the Hypocritic oath, I’d be free to do Hypocritical things. Like pretending to be a democrat while trying to oust elected governments via conspiracies. Like pretending to be a principled leader while treating my party like a principality. Like defending the disadvantaged while taking advantage of defenseless women. Like funding madrassahs in Pakistan whilst sending my owns sons to England’s best madrassah, at £ 22,000 a year.
The problem is not with me but with this formerly glorious land that was once full of stupas, but is now full of stupids.
Why is my marriage to my spiritual advisor a scandal? Because it shows my utter lack of judgment? Or because it reveals my callousness? Or both?
Well, I don’t care and I’m going to carry on doing whatever or whoever I like. I really thought I had it all under wraps and was enjoying the winter sun with my spiritual advisor out on the lawns of my Bunny Gala estate. Then, suddenly a drone flew past with GEO NEWS written on it. I waved and waved but it didn’t stop for me. It was not until my spiritual advisor gave me a violent nudge in the ribs that I stopped waving. My spiritual advisor dived under the table to hide herself but by then the drone had let down a streamer which said, “touch luck, dumb f—-k”. I was spelling it out to my spiritual advisor when I came to the end and realized that the middle three letters of the last word were missing.
The fact that GEO NEWS’ drones can’t spell so alarmed me that whilst still writing this diary, I began suffering from writer’s block. I turned to my spiritual advisor and said, “please give me a profound thought on which to conclude my diary”. She said what about “the end”?
Im the Dim
Imran Khan's Naya Pakistan and a soothsaying beau
Irfan Husain in The Dawn
WHATEVER people might think about Imran Khan’s words and antics, nobody can deny that he brings a lot of colour and macho swagger to politics.
By making bizarre accusations against rivals, he succeeds in putting them on the defensive while deflecting any criticism of his own course of action. And, like Trump, he shrugs off attacks from the tiny minority of liberal, secular critics who quaintly seek the truth in our political discourse.
And so the PTI circus rolls on from one triumph to the next, lights ablaze and trumpets blaring. In fact, it’s the only show in town, with other parties and politicians providing the chief showman with a series of easy targets. Nawaz Sharif is hit with the charge that he handed over state secrets to the Americans. Proof? That’s a 20th century concept with no relevance to contemporary Pakistani politics.
With just a few months to go until the general elections, you would think Imran Khan would be burnishing his party manifesto, and highlighting the achievements of his party in KP province. Far from it: judging from media coverage, the whole country is fixated on the Great Khan’s marriage proposal to his ‘spiritual guide’.
Frankly, I couldn’t care less about who Imran Khan marries: what happens between two consenting adults should be strictly their business. However, the fact that a national leader, and a serious contender for the country’s most powerful civilian job, should need the crutch of a resident soothsayer is disturbing.
According to breathless media coverage, it was the lady in question who advised Khan to go to the mountain resort of Nathiagali while the Panamagate trial was going on. But do we really want a prime minister who is so gullible? However, Khan is not alone in his superstitions: according to reports doing the rounds at the time, Nawaz Sharif sought guidance from a pir known as Dewana Baba in Mansehra.
We are informed through a report in Dawn from a couple of years ago that Asif Zardari probably managed to complete his term in office thanks to the powers of Pir Ejaz. Apart from this major triumph, he also claims that he was instrumental in enabling Zardari to access the $60 million sitting in Switzerland, and frozen by the authorities pending an investigation.
And let’s not forget the goats: apparently, one animal was slaughtered every day for the duration of the Zardari presidency. The same gent had advised the PPP head honcho to stay near the sea to ward off the evil eye, as well as other supernatural attacks launched by his enemies.
During her second stint as prime minister, Benazir Bhutto was reported to seek guidance from Dewana Baba, Nawaz Sharif’s seer. You’d think that after Sharif’s unceremonious departure, BB would have seen the light. No chance: once bitten by the oracle bug, the victim seeks to guard his spiritual flanks against attacks from the dark side.
It is often insecure leaders who seek the advice of oracles and seers. Lacking confidence in their own decision-making powers, they look to higher powers to guide them. And once you start believing in jinns, you need to counter hostile spirits with your own unseen troops.
But as we know all too well, soothsayers often get it terribly wrong. Just look at what happened to Rajapakse, the Sri Lankan ex-president: there he was, solidly entrenched with well over a year to go in his term of office, when he suddenly called for an early election. Overnight — and much to everyone’s surprise — a fractious opposition coalesced into an effective election machine, and defeated Rajapakse.
It later emerged that he had been advised by his resident oracle that the alignment of his stars predicted victory if he were to call the election a year earlier than they were due. Big mistake. When asked to explain what went wrong, the soothsayer replied that he had guided Rajapakse to victory twice before, and “two out of three” wasn’t a bad record.
In fact, while we pretend to be impervious to such superstitious rubbish, we surreptitiously glance at the horoscope columns in the newspapers to see what the stars say. Many supposedly rational leaders have sought spiritual help in gaining an edge over their rivals. Ronald Reagan’s wife regularly consulted a Californian syndicated horoscope columnist.
Mankind has always looked for help to ward off the terrors of the night when spirits stalk the land, and ghouls and zombies await the unwary. Most belief systems make mention of them in one form or another.
So in this wider context, does it matter that the man who would be prime minister believes in this mumbo-jumbo? Actually, yes. Many years ago, Imran Khan rubbished Darwin’s theory of evolution, overlooking the mass of accumulated evidence that supports it. Is this the man who will give us a ‘naya Pakistan’?
WHATEVER people might think about Imran Khan’s words and antics, nobody can deny that he brings a lot of colour and macho swagger to politics.
By making bizarre accusations against rivals, he succeeds in putting them on the defensive while deflecting any criticism of his own course of action. And, like Trump, he shrugs off attacks from the tiny minority of liberal, secular critics who quaintly seek the truth in our political discourse.
And so the PTI circus rolls on from one triumph to the next, lights ablaze and trumpets blaring. In fact, it’s the only show in town, with other parties and politicians providing the chief showman with a series of easy targets. Nawaz Sharif is hit with the charge that he handed over state secrets to the Americans. Proof? That’s a 20th century concept with no relevance to contemporary Pakistani politics.
With just a few months to go until the general elections, you would think Imran Khan would be burnishing his party manifesto, and highlighting the achievements of his party in KP province. Far from it: judging from media coverage, the whole country is fixated on the Great Khan’s marriage proposal to his ‘spiritual guide’.
Frankly, I couldn’t care less about who Imran Khan marries: what happens between two consenting adults should be strictly their business. However, the fact that a national leader, and a serious contender for the country’s most powerful civilian job, should need the crutch of a resident soothsayer is disturbing.
According to breathless media coverage, it was the lady in question who advised Khan to go to the mountain resort of Nathiagali while the Panamagate trial was going on. But do we really want a prime minister who is so gullible? However, Khan is not alone in his superstitions: according to reports doing the rounds at the time, Nawaz Sharif sought guidance from a pir known as Dewana Baba in Mansehra.
We are informed through a report in Dawn from a couple of years ago that Asif Zardari probably managed to complete his term in office thanks to the powers of Pir Ejaz. Apart from this major triumph, he also claims that he was instrumental in enabling Zardari to access the $60 million sitting in Switzerland, and frozen by the authorities pending an investigation.
And let’s not forget the goats: apparently, one animal was slaughtered every day for the duration of the Zardari presidency. The same gent had advised the PPP head honcho to stay near the sea to ward off the evil eye, as well as other supernatural attacks launched by his enemies.
During her second stint as prime minister, Benazir Bhutto was reported to seek guidance from Dewana Baba, Nawaz Sharif’s seer. You’d think that after Sharif’s unceremonious departure, BB would have seen the light. No chance: once bitten by the oracle bug, the victim seeks to guard his spiritual flanks against attacks from the dark side.
It is often insecure leaders who seek the advice of oracles and seers. Lacking confidence in their own decision-making powers, they look to higher powers to guide them. And once you start believing in jinns, you need to counter hostile spirits with your own unseen troops.
But as we know all too well, soothsayers often get it terribly wrong. Just look at what happened to Rajapakse, the Sri Lankan ex-president: there he was, solidly entrenched with well over a year to go in his term of office, when he suddenly called for an early election. Overnight — and much to everyone’s surprise — a fractious opposition coalesced into an effective election machine, and defeated Rajapakse.
It later emerged that he had been advised by his resident oracle that the alignment of his stars predicted victory if he were to call the election a year earlier than they were due. Big mistake. When asked to explain what went wrong, the soothsayer replied that he had guided Rajapakse to victory twice before, and “two out of three” wasn’t a bad record.
In fact, while we pretend to be impervious to such superstitious rubbish, we surreptitiously glance at the horoscope columns in the newspapers to see what the stars say. Many supposedly rational leaders have sought spiritual help in gaining an edge over their rivals. Ronald Reagan’s wife regularly consulted a Californian syndicated horoscope columnist.
Mankind has always looked for help to ward off the terrors of the night when spirits stalk the land, and ghouls and zombies await the unwary. Most belief systems make mention of them in one form or another.
So in this wider context, does it matter that the man who would be prime minister believes in this mumbo-jumbo? Actually, yes. Many years ago, Imran Khan rubbished Darwin’s theory of evolution, overlooking the mass of accumulated evidence that supports it. Is this the man who will give us a ‘naya Pakistan’?
The lesson for diagnosing a bubble
Tim Harford in The Financial Times
Here are three noteworthy pronouncements about bubbles.
“Prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” That was Professor Irving Fisher in 1929, prominently reported barely a week before the most brutal stock market crash of the 20th century. He was a rich man, and the greatest economist of the age. The great crash destroyed both his finances and his reputation.
“Those who sound the alarm of an approaching . . . crisis have somewhat exaggerated the danger.” That was a renowned commentator who shall remain nameless for now.
“We are currently showing signs of entering the blow-off or melt-up phase of this very long bull market.” That was investor Jeremy Grantham on January 3 this year. The normally bearish Mr Grantham mused that while shares seem expensive, historical precedents make it plausible that the S&P 500 will soar from present levels of around 2,700 to more than 3,500 before the crash occurs.
Mr Grantham’s speculation is striking because he has tended to be a savvy bubble watcher in the past. But as any toddler can attest, it is not an easy thing to catch one before it bursts.
There are two obvious ways to diagnose a bubble. One is to look at the fundamentals: if the price of an asset is unmoored from the cash flow it is likely to generate, that is a warning sign. (It is anyone’s guess what this implies for bitcoin, an asset that has no cash flow at all.)
The other approach is to look around: are people giddy with excitement? Can the media talk of little else? Are taxi drivers offering stock tips?
At the moment, however, these two approaches tell a different story about US stocks. They are expensive by most reasonable measures. But there are few other signs of speculative mania. The price rise has been steady, broad-based and was hardly the leading news of 2017. Given how expensive bonds are, it is hardly a surprise that stocks also seem pricey. No wonder investors and commentators are unsure what to say or do.
It seems all so much easier with hindsight: looking back, we can all enjoy a laugh at the Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, to borrow the title of Charles Mackay’s famous 1841 book, which chuckles at the South Sea bubble and tulip mania.
Yet even with hindsight things are not always clear. For example, I first became aware of the incipient dotcom bubble in the late 1990s, when a senior colleague told me that the upstart online bookseller Amazon.com was valued at more than every bookseller on the planet. A clearer instance of mania could scarcely be imagined.
But Amazon is worth much more today than at the height of the bubble, and comparing it with any number of booksellers now seems quaint. The dotcom bubble was mad and my colleague correctly diagnosed the lunacy, but he should still have bought and held Amazon stock.
Tales of the great tulip mania in 17th-century Holland seem clearer — most notoriously, the Semper Augustus bulb that sold for the price of an Amsterdam mansion.
“The population, even to its lowest dregs, embarked in the tulip trade,” sneered Mackay more than 200 years later.
But the tale grows murkier still. The economist Peter Garber, author of Famous First Bubbles, points out that a rare tulip bulb could serve as the breeding stock for generations of valuable flowers; as its descendants became numerous, one would expect the price of individual bulbs to fall.
Some of the most spectacular prices seem to have been empty tavern wagers by almost-penniless braggarts, ignored by serious traders but much noticed by moralists. The idea that Holland was economically convulsed is hard to support: the historian Anne Goldgar, author of Tulipmania, has been unable to find anyone who actually went bankrupt as a result.
It is easy to laugh at the follies of the past, especially if they have been exaggerated for the purposes of sermonising or for comic effect. Charles Mackay copied and exaggerated the juiciest reports he could find in order to get his point across. Then there is the matter of his own record as a financial guru. That comment, this time in full, “those who sound the alarm of an approaching railway crisis have somewhat exaggerated the danger”, was Mackay himself, writing in the Glasgow Argus in 1845, in full-throated support of the idea that the railway investment boom of the time would return a healthy profit to investors. It was, instead, a financial disaster. In the words of mathematician and bubble scholar Andrew Odlyzko, it was “by many measures the greatest technology mania in history, and its collapse was one of the greatest financial crashes”.
Oddly, Mackay barely mentions the railway mania in subsequent editions of his book — nor his own role as cheerleader. This is a lesson to us all. It’s very easy to scoff at past bubbles; it is not so easy to know how to react when one may — or may not — be surrounded by one.
Whither free market? Carillion the Government's preferred private contractor maybe bailed out.
Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian
You may never have heard of Carillion. There’s no reason you should have. Its lack of glamour is neatly summed up by the name it sported in the 90s: Tarmac. But since then it has grown and grown to become the UK’s second-largest building firm – and one of the biggest contractors to the British government. Name an infrastructure pie in the UK and the chances are Carillion has its fingers in it: the HS2 rail link, broadband rollout, the Royal Liverpool University Hospital, the Library of Birmingham. It maintains army barracks, builds PFI schools, lays down roads in Aberdeen. The lot.
There’s just one snag. For over a year now, Carillion has been in meltdown. Its shares have dropped 90%, it’s issued profit warnings, and it’s on to its third chief executive within six months. And this week, the government moved into emergency mode. A group of ministers held a crisis meeting on Thursday to discuss the firm. Around the table, reports the FT, were business secretary Greg Clark, as well as ministers from the Cabinet Office, health, transport, justice, education and local government. Even the Foreign Office sent a representative.
Why did Chris Grayling give the HS2 contract to a company that was already in existential difficulties?
That roll call says all you need to know about the public significance of what happens next at Carillion. This is a firm that employs just under 20,000 workers in Britain – and the same again abroad. It has a huge chain of suppliers – and its habit of going in for joint ventures with other construction businesses means that a collapse at Carillion would send shockwaves through the industry and through the government’s public works programme.
To see what this means, take the HS2 rail link, where Carillion this summer was part of a consortium that won a £1.4bn contract to knock tunnels through the Chilterns. If Carillion goes under, what happens to the largest infrastructure project in Europe? What happens to its partners on the deal, British firm Kier, and France’s Eiffage? The project will need to be put back and the taxpayer will almost certainly have to step in.
Imagine that same catastrophe befalling dozens of other projects across the UK and you get a sense of what’s at stake. Jobs will be cut, schools will go unbuilt (just a couple of months ago, Oxfordshire county council pulled the plug on a 10-year schools project) – and the government’s entire private finance initiative (PFI) model for building this country’s essential services will be shaken to the core. The dirty secret of PFI and all government attempts to pass public services into the private realm is that the shareholders make profits while the taxpayers remain on the hook for any losses.
After all, this isn’t the only case where the public sector’s reliance on one giant private-sector player endangers the provision of basic services. As my colleague Rob Davies reports in today’s paper, crisis-hit Four Seasons Health Care has run into yet another roadblock in its rescue talks. If those negotiations fail, then the big question will be who will look after the 17,000 elderly and vulnerable people in its care.
Carillion crisis: fears major government contractor is on the verge of collapse
Or look at rail, where as I wrote this week, transport secretary Chris Grayling has come to a disastrous deal (sorry, “pragmatic solution”) to allow Virgin Trains to get out of their contract to run the East Coast mainline three years early. The public will have to step into the breach with some makeshift arrangements and will forego hundreds of millions in lost franchise payments. The train operators will be able to go about their business and even take on new franchises.
Should Carillion go down, there will be another truckload of questions for Grayling. He awarded the firm its £1.4bn HS2 contract last July – by which time the writing was already on the wall. That job from the Department of Transport may have helped tide Carillion over for a bit – but why did the transport secretary give the work to a company that was already in existential difficulties? A firm known to have grown too quickly by borrowing hundreds of millions. A firm that just a few months later came under investigation of the Financial Conduct Authority. I have long thought that Grayling is less serious minister and more an unexploded landmine. I just wonder what the trigger will be.
But what happens to that minister is just one debacle of many as far as Carillion is concerned. Today you may never have heard of Carillion. Soon you may wish it had remained that way.
You may never have heard of Carillion. There’s no reason you should have. Its lack of glamour is neatly summed up by the name it sported in the 90s: Tarmac. But since then it has grown and grown to become the UK’s second-largest building firm – and one of the biggest contractors to the British government. Name an infrastructure pie in the UK and the chances are Carillion has its fingers in it: the HS2 rail link, broadband rollout, the Royal Liverpool University Hospital, the Library of Birmingham. It maintains army barracks, builds PFI schools, lays down roads in Aberdeen. The lot.
There’s just one snag. For over a year now, Carillion has been in meltdown. Its shares have dropped 90%, it’s issued profit warnings, and it’s on to its third chief executive within six months. And this week, the government moved into emergency mode. A group of ministers held a crisis meeting on Thursday to discuss the firm. Around the table, reports the FT, were business secretary Greg Clark, as well as ministers from the Cabinet Office, health, transport, justice, education and local government. Even the Foreign Office sent a representative.
Why did Chris Grayling give the HS2 contract to a company that was already in existential difficulties?
That roll call says all you need to know about the public significance of what happens next at Carillion. This is a firm that employs just under 20,000 workers in Britain – and the same again abroad. It has a huge chain of suppliers – and its habit of going in for joint ventures with other construction businesses means that a collapse at Carillion would send shockwaves through the industry and through the government’s public works programme.
To see what this means, take the HS2 rail link, where Carillion this summer was part of a consortium that won a £1.4bn contract to knock tunnels through the Chilterns. If Carillion goes under, what happens to the largest infrastructure project in Europe? What happens to its partners on the deal, British firm Kier, and France’s Eiffage? The project will need to be put back and the taxpayer will almost certainly have to step in.
Imagine that same catastrophe befalling dozens of other projects across the UK and you get a sense of what’s at stake. Jobs will be cut, schools will go unbuilt (just a couple of months ago, Oxfordshire county council pulled the plug on a 10-year schools project) – and the government’s entire private finance initiative (PFI) model for building this country’s essential services will be shaken to the core. The dirty secret of PFI and all government attempts to pass public services into the private realm is that the shareholders make profits while the taxpayers remain on the hook for any losses.
After all, this isn’t the only case where the public sector’s reliance on one giant private-sector player endangers the provision of basic services. As my colleague Rob Davies reports in today’s paper, crisis-hit Four Seasons Health Care has run into yet another roadblock in its rescue talks. If those negotiations fail, then the big question will be who will look after the 17,000 elderly and vulnerable people in its care.
Carillion crisis: fears major government contractor is on the verge of collapse
Or look at rail, where as I wrote this week, transport secretary Chris Grayling has come to a disastrous deal (sorry, “pragmatic solution”) to allow Virgin Trains to get out of their contract to run the East Coast mainline three years early. The public will have to step into the breach with some makeshift arrangements and will forego hundreds of millions in lost franchise payments. The train operators will be able to go about their business and even take on new franchises.
Should Carillion go down, there will be another truckload of questions for Grayling. He awarded the firm its £1.4bn HS2 contract last July – by which time the writing was already on the wall. That job from the Department of Transport may have helped tide Carillion over for a bit – but why did the transport secretary give the work to a company that was already in existential difficulties? A firm known to have grown too quickly by borrowing hundreds of millions. A firm that just a few months later came under investigation of the Financial Conduct Authority. I have long thought that Grayling is less serious minister and more an unexploded landmine. I just wonder what the trigger will be.
But what happens to that minister is just one debacle of many as far as Carillion is concerned. Today you may never have heard of Carillion. Soon you may wish it had remained that way.
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